Reflections of a stormy petrel

...is not altogether without precedent. Apart from the case of Celestine VI, Pius XII wrote and signed, but left undated, an act of resignation, to be activated in case the Nazis kidnapped him. That is to say that it is not completely out of the order of things. And the fact that people live longer now than they ever did before means that sooner or later something like this would have had to be considered. The job has got more rather than less demanding; from what I understand, one thing that helped Pope Benedict make up his mind was that his doctors had recommended no more intercontinental journeys, which are an essential part of the modern Papacy. I am still unhappy about it, because I love and admire the man so much, but I don't know what it is like to be in his shoes. And considering the storms that are about to engulf the Church from many sides (I refer to certain curious legal enactments passed in various countries including Britain), he may have felt that he could no longer summon the strength to fight and lead the people of God.

I am horrified. Of all the unwelcome, untimely, ill-conceived, unnecessary, insulting and disastrous measures Pope Benedict could have taken, this is the worst. On the very week that the most anti-Catholic and pro-abortion President has taken office in Washington DC, the Pope seems to indicate that open flirtations with Le Pen and Pinochet, notorious sympathies for Petain, open Jew-bashing of the vilest sort, are no obstacle to reconciliation with Rome. Thos of us who try to fight on a principled opposition to abortion and murder in all its forms have now had a ton of banana oil poured under our feet; any opponent of Catholic teaching will be able to raise the ugly spectre of Marcel "Marechal a nous!" Lefebvre, and the horrible living presence of Richard Williamson, whose moral and intellectual sins go even beyond his obscene denial of the Holocaust and belief in the Protocols. And what about Catholic leadership among Christians? For the last few decades, the mere force of events had driven many Christian bodies closer together, to discover that they shared so much of morality and belief, and against that dictatorship of relativism against which the Pope himself spoke such memorable words. And now, for the sake of a few hundred thousand obstinate, wilful and often bizarre schismatics, who never did anything on their own to earn or even encourage reunion, and who positively insulted the last two Popes, all this common ground, all this real and verifiable growth together, is endangered; because most Christians will see the Lefebvrists for what they are. Just because Richard Williamson is such an ugly caricature of the worst sort of traditionalists, real conservatives, let alone middle and liberals, will want nothing to do with him. How many Protestants and Anglicans in search of a decent Christian centre away from the various heresies and schisms of their own confessions will have seen this as confirmation that everything they had been told about Rome was in fact true? I am willing to bet that the conversion of adults will slow down considerably. And what about the Church itself? This act has been taken as much on the Pope's own decision as the famous Motu Proprio that sought to reinstate the Latin Mass. If the one can be described as reactionary, ill-advised, insensitive to Jew-bashing and admiration for tyrants, then so can the other. Far from strengthening the conservative side of the Church, the Pope has just delivered them a vial of poison. And at the same time, he has done nothing to please liberals, many of whom will read this to mean that one hard-right soul is more important to the Pope than one left-wing one, and either leave or reinforce even further their "inner schismatic" position. I will not leave the Church - I know how many like Williamson there are already; but many others may. There is absolutely no upside to this decision; every aspect of it is completely mistaken.

God help the Church. Mother of Victory, pray for us.

The admission by Guenther Grass, Nobel Prizewinner for literature and "conscience," or at least leading figure, of Germany's hard left, that he had been a member of the Waffen SS, raised some ugly thought in me.

That there was a long subterraneous - or not even so subterraneous - solidarity between Brown and Red, especially at the level of what might be called the international intelligentsija, is not exactly news. Everyone knows, for instance, that the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger was all but sheltered from de-Nazification, and given genuine new lustre, largely thanks to the French Communist writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Heidegger had done as much as anyone to aid the Nazi takeover of the German universities; and as the universities were the most prestigious and internationally respected bodies in Germany, it may be said that someone like Heidegger bore more guilt for the rise and propagation of Nazism than anyone outside the Party circle proper. But Heidegger and Sartre shared the philosophy of Existentialism, and, from his point of view, Sartre was quite right in trying to shelter his master - even though another Existentialist, Hannah Arendt, had told Heidegger to his face that Nazism was a natural and inevitable development of his, Heidegger's, philosophy.

Of course, Grass was not a philosopher of international repute, on whose writings people wrote PhD theses, when he committed his little indiscretion. He was a teen-age boy. At 15, he had tried to volunteer for the submarine service, but had been rejected on grounds of age; the Third Reich, at the time, was not yet desperate. It may have been on account of that earlier attempt that when he was drafted in 1944, he was sent, not to the Army, but to the Waffen SS, a wholly separate body. By late 1944, the SS had ceased to be a volunteer troop, as they had been through most of their history: frightful losses on the Russian front, the loss of most auslandsdeutsch districts - German-speakers outside Germany - which were their main recruiting ground, and the dubious loyalty of the Army after the July 20 plot, had made recruitment for them a matter that could no longer be trusted to volunteering. Even so, they were treated as elite units, and conscripts sent to them were regarded as select.

Grass admits that. He claims that he was drawn to the Waffen SS not by their political meaning, but by their reputation as the last-ditch troops, those who were sent to stop breaches in the line and on desperate or unconventional missions. He also claims that the two missions in which he took part were dangerous long-range reconnaissances far behind Russian lines, which is credible enough; and that he never shot a bullet in anger, which is rather less credible. ON April 20, 1945, as the whole front was slowly melting into the fire of advancing Russian American, British, Allied and Partisan armies, he was wounded and taken to a field hospital; and that was the end of his war. That is his story. I see no reason to doubt its detail, and it is not the detail that troubled me.

What roused my thoughts was that, until now - and it must be admitted that Grass seems to have made his admission of his own free will - he was believed to have served on an Anti-Aircraft unit. This connected him to another important German intellectual, his exact contemporary, Josef Ratzinger, who was forced out of the seminary where he was studying for the priesthood to be conscripted into one.

The difference between the two is the enthusiasm with which the teen-age Grass threw himself into the war effort, first trying to be a submariner, then taking with pleasure the role of a chosen soldier of the Party and Fuehrer. Young Ratzinger, on the other hand, entered the seminary in the clear consciousness that anyone who took that step deprived Army and State of his services - until the State, in its death throes, abolished the exemption of the priesthood and forced them into military service - and placed himself in an unfriendly position. And when he was recruited, he soon deserted.

What people unfamiliar with events will not realize is that, by deserting, Ratzinger showed no less purely physical courage than Grass reconnoitering behind Russian lines. Both risked a quick and nasty end. When American and French divisions crossed the Rhine in April 1945, they found the trees of the Black Forest hung with hundreds, thousands of dead young men hanged by their neck to save ammunition. These were soldiers who had been found to be AWOL, and been executed without trial or waiting. Some were hanged in their front yards, in front of their families Their executioners, on orders from Central Command, were the Waffen-SS - Guenther Grass' lot. As the chosen bearers of Nazi faith, they had been ordered to force the rest of Germany to resist to the last man, woman and child.

I am certainly not charging Mr.Grass with murder. As I said, I see no reason to doubt his unsolicited account of his wartime days, clearly the result of a deep personal unease. It is rather that this story places the two men, at a time when neither can have had even a suspicion of their extraordinary and iconic future, at opposite ends (Grass even says that he met Ratzinger in a POW camp after the war) of a really iconic group of events and institutions, and does so by anything but chance. What the one young man sought, the other fled. I do not know whether the misleading statement that young Grass fought his war in an Ack-Ack battery came from him or whether it was something he just allowed to be believed, it is clear that it was the sort of thing that could be believed of a decent, untainted German; that it did nothing to damage the reputation Grass was getting, as the moral authority of the German left. Yet young Ratzinger wanted nothing to do even with that, and risked the noose to escape it.

What attracted young Grass - whose parents had named him for a pagan Teutonic hero - and repelled young Ratzinger - whose parents had named for the husband of Mary and several Christian saints - was the suicidal appeal of the dying Nazi party. Whatever the ordinary German teen-ager might know, suspect, or be unwilling to suspect, of the horrors and crimes of his government, there was one thing that nobody could miss, that was the very daily atmosphere of dying Nazism: the heavily charged sense of suicidal, revolutionary glory and doom, of a whole party and nation turning kamikaze in order to bring down their enemies and themselves in one red and monstrous ruin. Weltmacht oder Niedergang, world power or annihilation; "Better an end in terror than a terror without end". These were not, unlike the massacre of Jews or Russians or disabled or negroes or homosexuals, things done in "night and fog"; they were the slogans and the reasons for existence of the Nazi Party, its mind and passion, its proudly exhibited belief. That those beliefs then led to political criminality on an untold scale is, in a sense, secondary; that is, in order to become thieves and murderers, men had first to assent to this mental attitude.

The revolted romanticism, the highly-charged, throbbing emotion of disgust and rejection, that lay at the heart of Nazism, is the join between the last days of Hitler as young Grass experienced them, and his destiny as Red Pope, moral authority of the anti-American, anti-capitalist, fanatically pseudo-pacifist hard left. The conclusions may be different; the root is the same. I do not know whether either Grass or Ratzinger ever thought of the other as in any way his opponent, his counter, the symbol as much as the leader of the forces he himself rejects; yet they oppose each other with a perfection that belongs more often to mythology than to real life. At seventy-eight years of life, filled in both cases with tremendous achievement and worldwide renown, the White Pope faces the Red still on the grounds of what the one rejected, and the other passionately accepted, in the dying days of Germany's awful night.

Like for instance this afternoon. Watching a direct broadcast of the Pope's visit to Auschwitz - one of the most significant and spiritually demanding events of his pontificate - only to have it overlain by a continuous stream of chatter from broadcasters who showed not the least understanding of anything that was going on and kept treating the Pope like a politician (you see, he is doing this because he wants a rapprochement with Jews; never mind that a spiritual leader cannot and should not have kept away from the place of the darkest evil in living memory, the place too where many Catholics were martyred). And then going on the internet and finding that the abortion that now passes for a government in Italy - where the fall of Berlusconi does not seem to have led to anything like the arrival of human beings to power - intends to force employment quotas by sex for public and private employers. This immoral and insulting (to women) practice will no doubt be disastrous for Italian business and give yet another area where businessmen are forced to break the law just to survive, and it is completely against the Constitution's principle of equality before the law - but never mind. With news like this, is it surprising that I have to stun myself with excessive eating?

Here is the link: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html. As with everything that I have read of his, it is simple in style, penetrating, full of unexpected connections, and of vast learning lightly worn. But I am rather amused to hear that some people, even in the Curia, were surprised at its "uncontroversial" content and expected something on some contemporary concern such as bioethics. I am willing to bet that the enemies of the Church, if and when they read it, will not find uncontroversial. I am willing to bet that the likes of aerynalexander or kennahijja would find it offensive in a dozen ways, some of which I cannot even guess at, but some of which (such as the calm restatement of the Catholic view of sexual love as being the link between one man and one woman) absolutely glare from the page.